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6 Ways to Boost Lead Generation for Window & Door Companies

As the owner of a window and door business, you wield a diverse skillset. Everything from estimations and procurement to installation and project management is under your supervision. However, that expertise often doesn’t extend to lead generation.

Many otherwise-successful businesses lack quality door and window lead generation. But the customers are out there—even in this economy. 23% of homeowners surveyed by Houzz expect to remodel in 2023, suggesting there’s still a robust market for home improvement projects. And among major home improvement projects, windows give homeowners a 67% return on investment, making it a safe remodeling option even with higher inflation.

Not sure how to generate window leads, door leads, or garage door leads? Keep reading to discover six proven strategies to generate more leads for your window and door company.

1. Launch New Partnerships

Partnering with local businesses whose products and services complement yours is a great way to put your company in front of an engaged, high-intent audience. All it takes is a bit of outreach and reciprocity in your local community.

Here are several examples of local businesses you can contact.

HVAC

Introduce yourself and your business to local HVAC companies, explaining how partnering with you is a win-win. For instance, customers can improve their HVAC efficiency and lower their electricity costs by getting new doors and windows.

Interior Designers

What better way to shine new light on that interior design project than with newer, bigger, brighter, and more efficient windows and doors? Partnering with local interior designers could connect with homeowners looking to reinvent their living spaces.

Real Estate Agents/Companies

Window and door companies and real estate agents have an intrinsically synergistic relationship. With a partnership, you can help real estate agents close the sale on that fixer-upper while you gain ready-to-buy leads.

Homeowners Associations

While some homeowner associations may be averse to promoting services, you can sweeten the deal by offering significantly discounted one-time services in association-run common areas. And homeowner associations are invested in maintaining the long-term quality of their community. You can provide that through quality window and door upgrades.

2. Expand Your Network

Successful lead generation for window and door contractors and installers involves catching customers at the right place at the right moment. Here are several important events and organizations you can participate in to stay top of mind for high-intent window and door customers.

Local Business Associations/Chambers of Commerce

As a small business owner, you’ll feel right at home at your local business association or chamber of commerce event. These organizations are filled with like-minded professionals you should network with for many reasons, including door and window lead generation.

Networking at your local business association keeps your business top of mind, not just for commercial jobs but also for the owners’ and employees’ residential door and window jobs.

Apartment/Rental/Landlord Associations

Apartment, rental, and landlord organizations are some of the highest-value customers for a door and window business. Many landlords own multiple properties. That means more opportunities now and in the future. Becoming the door and window company of choice for these landlords can lead to repeat business for years.

Industry-Specific Trade Shows

Picture your target audience. Then picture where you’ll find them all together at their most enthusiastic best. That’s right—you’re picturing a trade show.

Vendors have long utilized trade show booths, networking events, and keynotes as high-impact lead-generation channels to get their business’s message in front of their target audience. For the sake of your lead generation, make sure you attend the next time a real estate, interior design, general construction, or other relevant trade show comes to your area.

3. Grow with Digital Marketing

Like any target audience, people searching for doors, garage doors, and windows tend to research and browse online before calling local businesses. If you can get the right message in front of prospects on their phones, laptops, tablets, smart TVs, or other devices while they’re researching, you can generate quality leads for your products and services.

“Digital marketing” is a massive topic and can refer to various channels and strategies. To save you some time, here’s how to generate window leads, door leads, and garage door leads with just a few high-impact digital marketing channels.

Organic Digital Marketing

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

Search engines, especially Google, are gateways to the internet. Whether someone is curious about what door and window replacement involves or ready to kick off their project tomorrow, they’re likely using Google to get the information they need.

Search engine marketing (SEM) refers to the paid and organic strategies that companies use to market to people searching for products and services online. The organic component of SEM is called search engine optimization, or SEO.

SEO is a digital marketing strategy that involves optimizing a website to improve its ranking in search engine results pages. By ranking higher in Google, more potential customers can organically find your business online during their searches.

So, where should you start? SEO lead generation for window and door installers should involve at least the following three elements.

Keyword/Local Optimization

“Keywords” are the words your customers use to research and browse products and services related to your company. Combine product and service keywords with location-specific keywords (i.e., your city, county, state, or neighborhood) in your content. Don’t be surprised when prospective window and door customers in your area start visiting your website during their buying journey.

Organic Search Profiles

Your Google Business, Yelp, and Bing Places profiles are essential to your online presence and, if properly utilized, can become an excellent lead-generation channel. Developing these profiles to feature the latest information, persuasive messaging, and customer reviews enhances your online reputation and ensures prospective customers can quickly contact you.

PR & Link-Building

Public relations (PR) are how businesses get mentioned (ideally positively) in mass media like local news outlets, industry blogs or journals, and resource lists. An effective PR program works in concert with the content you publish on your website to build name recognition. It also establishes your reputation for excellence and knowledge in the field.

PR has become even more critical with the advent of search engines and their ranking algorithms. Search engines like Google determine the results for a query based in part on “domain authority.” Getting links from independent news sources and, to a lesser degree, from other businesses’ websites increases your site’s authority and improves your site’s rankings.

Non-Organic Digital Marketing

SEO is focused on generating organic leads for your business. There are also non-organic leads you should be pursuing. Non-organic leads are prospective customers you connect with through paid channels like ads or subscribing to professional networks.

Here are non-organic channels you can utilize.

PPC (Pay-Per-Click) Search Advertising

Another important component of search engine marketing (SEM) is pay-per-click search advertising, or “PPC” for short. PPC is the practice of only paying for actual clicks instead of how often your ad is served (“impressions”). While PPC search advertising commands a higher per-unit price than impressions, it has the benefit of ensuring you pay for actual clicks, which can turn into leads.

Think of PPC search advertising as the paid counterpart to your SEO campaign. Search advertising basically guarantees that people will see your ads. On the other hand, it can be expensive.

Additionally, sponsored results don’t hold the same weight for some people as organic or earned results. That’s why most successful digital door and window lead generation campaigns incorporate SEO and PPC search advertising.

Paid & Organic Social Media

Social media marketing involves many concepts already discussed in this article, applied specifically to social media. Here’s how to use the paid and organic components of NextDoor, Facebook, and Instagram for door and window lead generation.

NextDoor

Paid:

NextDoor is a platform for people to discuss topics affecting their homes and communities. NextDoor ads, called “Local Deals,” are structured around a deal or discount, so think carefully about what savings your business can credibly offer. Additionally, try to incorporate testimonials, which are very important to these users.

Organic:

NextDoor users can recommend local businesses on the platform. Focus on getting satisfied customers to recommend you on NextDoor, so your business appears in searches on the platform. Companies can also comment on threads, an excellent opportunity to display your knowledge, engage with the local community, and contribute to your door and window lead generation program.

Facebook & Instagram

Paid:

Meta Ads Manager guides you through making ads on Facebook and Instagram by asking you questions about your goals. For door and window lead generation, you’ll probably want to opt for the “Consideration” objective. Consider incorporating a “lead magnet,” such as a downloadable window and door replacement guide, in exchange for providing customers’ email addresses.

Organic:

Knowing that posts with images or videos see the most engagement on Facebook and that Instagram is essentially a visual medium, keep your Facebook timeline and Instagram feed updated with pictures from recent projects, perhaps accompanied by short testimonials from satisfied customers.

4. Move from Mass Mailers to Targeted Mailings

Many door and window companies use print mail to great effect, but there can be a lot of waste involved—literally. To save money on your door and window lead generation efforts and a whole lot of trees, try being more selective and targeted with your mailings.

Here’s how you can focus your mailer marketing.

Homes Sold on MLS That Require Remodel

Here’s another way to leverage those partnerships you’re building with realtors. Licensed agents can access the multiple listing service, or MLS, which contains a record of all homes sold. Additionally, many realtors tend to have a supernatural sense for what’s recently sold in an area.

Ask your realtor to help you direct your mailings to homes that have recently sold. Why? Many recent home buyers are likely to remodel. And voila! You’re precisely targeting buyers who are actually in need of your services. Score one for the trees.

Piggyback off Partner Emails

Wondering how to generate window and door leads and be more targeted with your mailings simultaneously? Start with email—specifically, your partners’ emails. Think of all the emails they send for a variety of situations. At least several of those will be good opportunities for your business to be featured.

Say your HVAC partner follows up with a homeowner whose HVAC system they recently serviced and whose home appears to need new windows and doors. You could passively feature your message at the bottom of that follow-up email to everyone’s benefit: the homeowner (who gets new windows and more efficient heating and cooling), the HVAC partner (who you can offer to do the same for), and, of course, you.

5. Improve Your Window & Door Customer Experience

Regarding lead generation for window and door companies, existing customers can be your biggest advocates or your worst detractors. Recommendations and referrals (more on those in a minute) from existing customers are how many contractors get new business. That’s why you should be constantly working to improve your customer experience.

Project Management/Productivity Refinement

One high-impact way to improve the windows and doors customer experience? Complete your installation faster. With the right project management software, you can increase your efficiency and offer a more professional experience for customers.

Automation

Business owners know that in addition to sending marketing emails to prospects, sending follow-ups to existing customers can result in new leads. However, most small business owners don’t have the time to sit in the office and send emails or the budget to hire someone else. This is where automation can make a big difference. With today’s contractor CRM software, you can set up automated reminders and emails and have this critical lead-generation activity taken care of for you.

Reputation Management

In today’s “review-everything” economy, reputation management is just as important for contractors as it is for restaurants. Responding to posted reviews and creating a stream of positive reviews is critical to the long-term success of your business.

With reputation management software, maintaining your reputation online is much simpler and less time-consuming than you might think.

6. Leverage Customer & Partner Referrals

We’ve mentioned the importance of referrals a few times already, but what are the actual mechanics of obtaining and managing them? Here are a few tips to help secure referrals and generate new leads while maintaining a positive relationship with existing customers.

Requesting Referrals

Now that you’ve got automated reminders and emails, getting referrals can be automated to a large degree. Include a referral request in your follow-up email to customers post-installation. That way, you can ask every customer at the perfect time without creating any more work for yourself. Consider including a discount code for customers to share with their friends.

In addition to emails, you can create a referral page on your site that allows satisfied customers to input referral(s) information.

These approaches formalize the referrals process, allowing you to better track and follow up on referrals over traditional methods.

Incentives

The question of whether to include incentives to stimulate referrals is important. Obviously, you’d like to obtain referrals without offering a gift card, cash, or a discount on a recent or future job. However, you’ll inevitably find some customers need a monetary or other incentive to go through the process.

A good middle ground would be asking customers for referrals without an incentive on the first go-around and only following up with incentives when you aren’t getting enough referrals. Limiting the number of incentives you’ll offer is an excellent way to ensure customers don’t suddenly all leap at once at the opportunity.

Building a Holistic Strategy

When researching how to generate window leads or door leads, it can be tempting to only focus on the approaches you’re comfortable with. But an effective lead generation strategy will use all the channels available to you.

How to Optimize a Press Release to Benefit SEO

SEO is as essential for your press release as it is for other content.

Since consumers look for brands online, optimizing your press release for SEO holds more importance than ever. It can help your customers learn about your brand through various online sources. Press releases can even get featured in Google news and get shared on social media.

As more users consume online content, press releases have the potential to bring you quality backlinks. They can help you spread brand awareness among potential customers who don’t even know about you. That’s possible only if you optimize your press releases to make them accessible for those who are in dire need of your products or services.

An SEO-friendly press release helps you ensure that your news reaches the right eyes (targeted audience).

This easy-to-consume guide teaches you how to optimize your press releases so that they catch the attention of potential customers and increase your brand’s reach.

How to Optimize Your Press Release for SEO and Potential Customers

The purpose of SEO is to get your press release out there in front of your potential customers. To make sure that they receive your message, let’s discuss how you should optimize your press release.

1. Insert Keywords

Optimizing your press release always starts with adding keywords. You should search for keywords relevant to your industry and include those keywords in the title, introduction, and the content of your press release.

Keywords can play a vital role in getting your press release found by the users who are looking for similar products and services.

For example, being a content marketer, I always look for news that tells me something new about the marketing world. The headline below recently got my attention:

Image source: Business Wire

As you look closely, this headline includes keywords like “smart technology,” “marketing,” and “2019.” These words are enough to compel me to click and read more.

You have to search for keywords that users are looking for and create your press release around them. You can use Google’s Keyword Planner to find out keywords with high search volume. You can then include them in your press release.

Sometimes, you can even use your selected keywords to come up with ideas for your next press release. For example, type the keyword “increase organic traffic to website” into Google. With the help of the “People also ask” box, you can get ideas for your next press release.

The “People also ask” box says that users want to learn how to increase organic traffic in 2019. You can use this to create a press release about how you grew your organic traffic from 10K to 100K over a specific period of time.

2. Conduct Competitive Research

Are your competitors doing well with their press releases?

It’s time to steal their keywords and create better press releases using those keywords.

You should make a list of keywords your competitors are using and add them to your own list. You can use SpyFu’s competitor analysis features to analyze which keywords your competitors are targeting and where their backlinks are coming from.

Their backlink sources can give you a list of websites where you can publish your press releases to get found by relevant users.

Image via SpyFu

3. Pick a Valuable Headline

It all begins with the headline.

“80% of users read headlines while only 20% of them read the entire content.”

– Copyblogger

In this digital age, where content is coming from all sides, the headline is your only opportunity to grab users’ attention. It can make or break your efforts behind creating the press release. That’s why you should spend some time to use this opportunity wisely.

You should follow the tips mentioned below to craft click-worthy headlines and optimize them with keywords:

The headline must be informative and deliver some value.
Avoid jargon (if possible).
Insert essential keywords.
Offer solutions to a problem.
Use numbers in your headline (as numbers get more clicks).
Insert words that depict emotions.

Let me give you an example of keyword-rich eye-catching title.

Image source: Fit Small Business

Targeted audience: those who want a loan

Keywords: free loan, loan help

Emotional words: loan in time of need

Get it?

4. Begin Your Press Release with 5 Ws

Now that you have your title and keywords, it’s time to work on the first paragraph of your press release.

After the headline, it is the introduction that keeps users engaged and encourages them to keep reading. The first paragraph of your press release should answer these five questions:

When?
Where?
Who?
What?
Why?

You might have noticed that most press releases mention details such as date, place, and name at the beginning. These details can trigger the imagination of users by providing them with details about an event you’re hosting or the product line you’re launching.

After these details, you should highlight the message that you want to deliver as a brand. It gives users a clear idea of what the press release is about and why they should read more.

Following this 5 Ws format to write your press release can help you cover all of these things. And you shouldn’t forget to include your target keyword once in the first paragraph. However, you should make sure that it sounds natural so that Google doesn’t penalize you for keyword stuffing.

Let’s take a look at this press release by TicketCity quoted below and see how beautifully it illustrates the brand’s message at the beginning.

Image source: TicketCity

TicketCity’s press release highlights the message that the brand is giving away a year of tickets to one lucky fan.

5. Write Engaging Content

Users are lazy these days. They don’t like reading long content unless they find it engaging.

This is why you have to think like a journalist. Gripping stories from current events, sports, and even entertainment make you read to the end. That’s how you want your content to be.

Journalists use these tricks to grab the interest of their readers and keep them engaged for longer:

Tell stories.
Get to the point.
Include quotes.
Use data/examples to prove your points.
Provide background information (if needed).

Finally, you should summarize your press release with a boilerplate.

A boilerplate is the last paragraph of a press release, where you give a short introduction of your organization. It’s your chance to describe your company. You should focus on answering “who” and “what” in this section to install your brand’s name in the readers’ minds.

Let’s take the example of Hebrew’s free loan news further to understand how to write thought-provoking content for your press release.

Image source: Fit Small Business

Another thing to note here is that you should optimize the content of your press release for SEO. You should make sure that you evenly distribute relevant keywords throughout.

6. Leverage the Power of Visuals

“Users remember only 10% of the information they read after three days of consuming that content. With added visuals, their memory power increase by 65%.”

– Brain Rules

Visuals can help you increase the effectiveness of your press release. Adding visuals can help you prevent users from getting bored and engage them in a better way. Visuals can also help people remember your content better and longer.

You can easily include visuals such as images and videos in the content of your press release. They can help you take the story further. To optimize the visuals in your press release for SEO, you can include keywords in their file names, captions, and alt text so that Google gets an idea about what your image is about.

7. End with a Call-to-Action (CTA)

You spend a lot of time creating an engaging, SEO-friendly press release. Do you want your readers to leave without taking the desired action? I don’t think so.

You need to ensure that your readers get a fair idea of what you want to convey and what they should do after reading your press release. You can encourage users to take the desired action by smartly placing a compelling call-to-action.

Your CTA totally depends on what you want to achieve using your press release. So, you should determine your aim behind creating it.

Do you want to:

Get new email subscribers?
Sell something?
Increase event attendees?
Gain more traction for your product launch?

You should add a relevant call-to-action to meet your end-goal.

Pro Tip: You should avoid using common CTAs like “click here” as they tend to drive your users away.

Let’s take a look at a few effective ways to use CTAs at the end of your press release.

Offer freebies to download (they must be relevant to the topic of your press release).
Include a form that users can fill out if they want to learn more.
Offer deals like “buy now and get 50% off.”
Invite them to call you for a free consultation.
Use FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) to promote product sales on discounted prices for a limited time.
Include numbers and percentages.

Using CTAs creatively can help you engage and convert more consumers.

Conclusion

Press releases can help you get the word out about your brand, products, and services. However, to make sure that they reach the right audience, you need to optimize them for SEO.

I’m sure the tactics we’ve mentioned above will help you optimize your press release for SEO. You can implement them to convey your message to potential customers and encourage them to take the desired action.

How Fast Should A Website Load & How To Speed It Up

In short, your website should load as fast as possible!
The ideal website load time for mobile sites is 1-2 seconds.
53% of mobile site visits are abandoned if pages take longer than 3 seconds to load.
A 2-second delay in load time resulted in abandonment rates of up to 87%.
Google itself aims for under half-a-second load time
A VERY SLOW SITE can be a NEGATIVE Google Ranking factor.
The average load time for mobile sites is 19 seconds over 3G connections. Models predict that publishers whose mobile sites load in 5 seconds earn up to 2x more mobile ad revenue than those whose sites load in 19 seconds.
People would not return to websites that took longer than four seconds to load and formed a “negative perception” of a company with a badly put-together site or would tell their family and friends about their experiences.
Slow load times are the primary reason visitors abandon a checkout process.
In studies, Page Time Load goes from 1s to 3s – the probability of bounce increases by 32%.
In studies, Page Time Load goes from 1s to 5s – the probability of bounce increases by 90%.
In studies, Page Time Load goes from 1s to 6s – the probability of bounce increases 106%.
In studies, Page Time Load goes from 1s to 10s – the probability of bounce increases 123%.
In a recent study, the average load time for a web page was 3.21s.
In a recent study, the average load time for a mobile web page is 22 seconds.
For every 100ms decrease in homepage load speed, a company’s customer base saw a 1.11% lift in session-based conversion
Users read fewer articles each day whilst experiencing delays loading each web page. The speed of the site negatively impacts a user’s session depth, no matter how small the delay.
Two-thirds of US consumers (67%) cite slow loading times as the main reason they would abandon an online purchase.
47 percent of consumers expect a web page to load in two seconds or less.
40 percent of consumers will wait no more than three seconds for a web page to render before abandoning the site
52 percent of online shoppers stated that quick page loading is important to their site loyalty.
Shoppers often become distracted when made to wait for a page to load. 14 percent will begin shopping at another site, and 23 percent will stop shopping or walk away from their computer.
Remember to optimize your images – the most important thing you can do to decrease download times. Load background images via external CSS. Minimize white space, line returns, and comment tags. Remove unnecessary META tags and META content. Minimize unnecessary javascript and another client-side scripting. A technical approach to improving user experience, it seems to me, would begin with site speed.
A faster site should improve visitor satisfaction levels and the number of conversions.
Google might crawl your site slower if you have a very slow site (confirmed by Google).
Retail and travel sites – 79 percent of online shoppers who experience a dissatisfying visit are less likely to buy from that site again. 64 percent would simply purchase from another online store.
Automotive retail sites take on average 6 seconds to load.
Customer packaged goods sites take on average 6.1 seconds to load.
Finance sites take on average 5.1 seconds to load.
Healthcare sites take on average 5.6 seconds to load.
Media sites take on average 5.5 seconds to load.
Retail sites take on average 6 seconds to load.
Technology sites take on average 6.8 seconds to load.
Travel sites take on average 6.7 seconds to load.
Improving your desktop site speed score in isolation of developing a compelling user experience, will not magically lead to BETTER rankings in Google in the short term.
Ranking is a nuanced process and there are over 200 signals, but now speed is one of them. Know that ‘content’ and relevance’ are still primary. Website and page load speed may affect Google rankings, just not as much as high-quality links, good titles & content that satisfies a search engine visitors’ intent.